Winter Contrasts - in a dark time

The American poet Theodor Roethke has a great opening to one of his poems: ‘In a dark time, the eye begins to see, / I meet my shadow in the deepening shade’. In winter we face this possibility of more than outer darkness — there is another kind of dark, which at its worst we call evil. At its best — when we are at our best — it can teach us. And what an opportunity it offers us!

It is natural for the inner life to loom large in winter, and there is rich nourishment in stories. The treasury of tales for children is endless; here I want to refer to just one — Rumpelstiltskin. You know the story — a miller boasts to the king that his beautiful daughter can spin straw into gold; the king locks her in a room of straw with a spinning wheel, and in the midst of her distress a little man enters the room and offers to do it — for a price. Three times he does this, and on the third occasion, having nothing else to give him in return, she promises that she will let him have her first child. The king, impressed by her apparent capabilities, marries her and a year later a child is born. As she celebrates, the little man appears and demands the child. She is so distraught, he allows her three days to guess his name; yet despite all help and effort she cannot guess. On the third day she expects to lose her child, but a messenger comes and tells her that in a hut in the forest he came upon a little man dancing and chanting:

Rumplestiltskin is my name
But no one knows it, to their shame.

When the little man appears, she names him: Rumpelstiltskin! In fury, he stamps his right foot into the floor, and in taking hold of his left foot and trying to free himself, he tears himself in two.

Evil does not like being named. There have been several documentaries on television recently revealing some of the acts of torture sanctioned by various regimes. Apart what Hannah Arendt called ‘the banality of evil’, what struck me was the extraordinary behaviour of denial by officials and politicians when confronted. In these moments, do they perceive themselves? They metaphorically, morally, tear themselves in two.

We have an obligation to protect childhood. ‘Deliver us from evil’ is an injunction for every human being. But we also have to prepare children for the fact of evil’s existence — stories enable children to experience moral challenges within their own imaginations, and then for the conscience to respond, strengthening, standing up, naming… Knowing.